Consultants bag £37m from failed e-Borders contract The Home Office paid more than £37m to just one consultancy for advice on the e-Borders contract, which was torn up by the coalition after the election. The advisory payments to Deloitte compare to the £750m cost of the floundering project to record details of every traveller into and out of the UK. Trusted Borders, the …
e-Borders is only working for flights. The UKBA have no idea how to make it work for Eurostar, cross channel ferries or private sailing boats. Nor are there viable solutions for the Eire/NI border. Or for travel to and from the Isle of Man. Deloitte's have nothing to be proud of. The e-Borders system is predicated on having a sealed border, and checking everyone who comes in or out against a central database, before they travel. This will never happen, as the UK's borders are far too porous. EU rules says no-one has to tell the UKBA anything about their travel plans in advance if all they are doing is crossing an internal EU border. Deloittte's should have told the UKBA (run by Lin Homer, paid over £200,000 a year for presiding over this mess) that it would never work. One page report. Fee £20,000. end of story.
Have an up vote on me. You'll have read Francis Maude's views on Big IT then? No contract with more than £100m whole life costs, and making sure it's accessible to small and open source competitors.
Mind you, I'll believe it when I see it, and no doubt the usual consultancies will get their snouts in the trough giving advice and guidance on how to make the new methods work.
"Throughout the engagement Deloitte ... enabled the programme to develop an integrated, multi-disciplinary team who were highly motivated, professional and delivery-focused." (Who never finished the job)
What a lot of codswallop - the only success they achieved was extracting unjustified fees from the tax payer.
I spent many months on the project, and I cant think of a less apt phrase to use regarding the consortium. The inter-company contracts were a farce, making delivery of functional code a joke. Would be better to split it up into smaller contracts that could be managed more effectively by the Home Office.
Wait a minute, "managed more effectively by the Home Office"; there must be a joke in there somewhere...
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This is probably the only useful tool against illegal immigration, The problem they had with deporting immigrants is that they would go to another country and get another identity and come back again. The eBorders uses biometrics and they are a little harder to fake
(Note in China some women were arrested for using fake latex fingerprints, apparently there's a hugh black market for them in China and there fingerprint database is roughly 104million)
Whats actually happening is that there is a mini arms race with biometrics where every country is tryng to collect as much as possible and the UK has managed to cock it up but still want in so they are deciding to piss away more money but they keep using prehistoric civil servants who are still amazed that PCs no longer come with floppy drives and the only way to run an IT project is through the "Tradition Life Cycle" WTF?!??!!
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